Nevins said that there have been no conversations with co-creator/director David Lynch about more episodes. Levine reminded everyone that it took 25 years after the first two seasons for the third one to come about. And noted the herculean effort by Lynch in the past two years to write, direct, act in, edit and score 18 consecutive hours of television. But while Lynch may not be ready to return to TV right away, “the door at Showtime is always open for him to do more Twin Peaks or anything else,” Levine said.

The new Twin Peaks (2017) finds David Lynch working in fresh and sublimely haunting domains, ones that pleasurably flirt or unnervingly skirt the spectral drop-offs of some charged and sinister abyss. This seems no visional or evolutional change of tack, nor does it appear, at least in these early episodes, Lynch is newly surveying unmapped terrains. Rather, there is something more elevated in this late-career landscape, and something far more intimate as well. One senses, when viewing this new series, particularly his excursions into Lynchian Other-Realms, that his articulation of these doppelgänging worlds feel more experiential than conceptual, more occupied than conceptualized.

Madness grips the airwaves like a deafening transmission, and the overlords of the earth seem to speak in terrifyingly grim visions. Thank the gods that every age produces its own soothsayers. It is fitting, then, that just as a surreal state of affairs takes hold, David Lynch returned to us with Twin Peaks: The Return, a continuation of his landmark cult 1990s series that combined melodrama with the director’s brand of surrealist imaginings. But not only did Lynch return, he also shows himself to be fully in tune with these new dark ages. Episode 8 of the revival in particular goes beyond television or even cinema — it is one mad flow about our civilization’s communion with dark forces to unleash absolute destruction.

Lynch is the quintessential American surrealist, who along with Alejandro Jodorowsky, is one of the last true keepers of the flame of that hallucinatory, anarchic moment where art and dream combined to expose the world. Newer talents like Greece’s Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, Killing of a Sacred Deer) retain the essence of surrealism, but it is masters like Lynch who provide a window into where we come from, and where we are going.

The entire Twin Peaks revival has been a chance for Lynch to fully indulge — through the freedom of cable television — in the obsessions, nightmares and visions that have fueled his work since that classic 1977 debut Eraserhead. Yet this new Twin Peaks is also closer to Lynch’s cinema where the dark, bloody heart of Americana erupts in murderous dreamscapes such as Blue Velvet, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. In particular Episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return pushes further than even those movies, revealing a filmmaker attuned to the concerns of his species.